Telegram Context MCP

Read Telegram through your own account from an MCP client. Find permitted conversations, search and read original posts, navigate topics and replies, and inspect albums, reactions, and polls. Connect several local clients to one session-owning process, or run standalone STDIO.

Supports Windows, macOS, and Linux with Python 3.12–3.15. The server uses Telethon and preserves original text, dates, links, entities, and available metadata. It does not send messages, join channels, mark messages read, or download attachment bytes.

Install and log in

Install uv, then run:

uv tool install --python 3.12 telegram-context-mcp==0.3.0
telegram-mcp --version
telegram-mcp login
telegram-mcp configure
telegram-mcp status

These examples target release 0.3.0; check PyPI for published versions. Use the source setup for unreleased revisions. Upgrading from 0.2? Read the response migration guide, then restart the server and refresh your client's tool schemas.

Obtain api_id and api_hash from my.telegram.org, then enter them in the local login prompt with your phone number, login code, and any 2FA password. Do not send login codes or credentials to the model.

configure lets you choose folders/chats and separately enable all-chat access, explicit public-channel reads, or public-channel discovery. Enter keeps the current value. By default, no message sources are permitted. status should report authorized: true after login. Use catalog to find folder and chat IDs locally.

The package name is telegram-context-mcp; the executable is telegram-mcp. You can also run a pinned version without installing a persistent command:

uvx --python 3.12 --from telegram-context-mcp==0.3.0 telegram-mcp --version

Connect your clients

Start one server in a terminal and leave it running:

telegram-mcp serve --transport http

It listens only on http://127.0.0.1:8765/mcp. Configure each MCP client to launch telegram-mcp connect over STDIO. This small proxy reads the local token and connects to the existing server; it does not start a server or silently fall back to another Telegram session. Closing a client leaves the shared server running.

Client examples cover Codex, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code, including a pinned uvx command and executable paths for Windows.

For one client, standalone STDIO is still available: configure that client to launch telegram-mcp serve. Use either mode for a given session. Stop the session-owning process before running local login, configure, catalog, or status; use the get_status MCP tool while the server is running.

All shared clients use the same Telegram account, read permissions, and cursor store. The HTTP bearer token is created in the local user profile and read by connect; do not paste it into client configuration. This is a local, single-user integration.

Tools

First tasks

• Ask the client to list the folders you permitted and read a selected conversation over a timezone-qualified date range.
• Enable discovery to find candidate public channels, select a source, then read its posts with a separate read permission.
• Follow next_cursor with the original filters until it is null. An empty page can still have a cursor. Respect retry_after_seconds after a temporary failure.
• For CATALOG_LOADING, repeat the original call after the reported delay. The server retains catalog progress; explicit reads independent of folders skip that scan.
• Use get_messages with next_text_offset to finish long text. Album completeness is explicitly unknown; each member remains a separate source message.

Usage and response contracts explain filters, cursor recovery, topics, public-channel discovery, and message metadata. Message text is data for the calling agent, not an instruction source.

Configuration and troubleshooting

Configuration, Telegram sessions, and the HTTP token live outside the repository in platform-specific user directories. The login command prints the configuration path. Use telegram-mcp --config /absolute/private/config.toml COMMAND to select another file; pass the same file to the shared server and each proxy.

On POSIX, private files use restrictive permissions. On Windows, protect them with user-profile filesystem ACLs; Unix 0600 is not an ACL guarantee. A Telegram session contains account access credentials, and the underlying account can do more than the server's read-only tools allow.

• Configuration and permissions
• Troubleshooting
• Example TOML
• Security reporting

Run from source

git clone https://github.com/egor-fedorov/telegram-mcp.git
cd telegram-mcp
uv sync --locked --python 3.12
uv run --locked telegram-mcp login
uv run --locked telegram-mcp configure
uv run --locked telegram-mcp serve --transport http

For client commands, use the checkout's .venv/bin/telegram-mcp on POSIX or .venv\Scripts\telegram-mcp.exe on Windows, with connect as the argument. Use an absolute executable path so clients do not depend on their working directory.

Development

Run make check for formatting, lint, types, architecture checks, and offline tests. Contributing includes equivalent commands for Windows without Make. Changes use focused pull requests and squash merges after CI. See the roadmap, architecture, changelog, and release procedure. The 0.3 validation record reports payload-size measurements and the scope of selected-source live checks.

The code is MIT licensed. This does not grant rights to Telegram content. Secret chats are unsupported; attachment downloads, sending, administration, and persistent archives are separate future work. Use source material you are entitled to share with your chosen model and follow Telegram's content terms.